Vehicles of various kinds, including terrestrial, marine, and flying vehicles are well known in the art. Such vehicles are typically, and increasingly, equipped with a wide variety of electrically powered vehicular components. Such components can and do serve a wide range of purposes that range from mission-critical to mere convenience or comfort. Such electrically powered vehicular components, in turn, require a source of electric power.
In many cases, at least some of these components are relatively fungible across platforms. That is, a given component may be installable and operable in a number of different vehicles. In some application settings, this unfettered fungibility may be acceptable or even desired. In other application settings, however, such an approach can lead to problems.
For example, there can be important inventory-control and/or safety reasons that are at odds with such an approach. It can be highly undesirable or even dangerous for uninformed, negligent, or even willful maintenance personnel, for example, to remove a given component from one aircraft and install that component in another aircraft without appropriate consideration of such an action. While established rules and procedures regarding the conduct of such affairs can be of some assistance in this regard, the ready fungibility of such components nevertheless offers, at best, an error prone circumstance with little tolerance for mischief when it occurs.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions with respect to their corresponding respective areas of inquiry and study except where specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.